Been trying out the spellchecker with the Markdown editor and no problems have been found. As I have gone through the my notes I have added many, many words to my user dictionary. I did not fancy doing that all over again on every desktop client so I thought I would just copy across the user dictionary from one machine to the other. Eventually I found it at:
I copied it to the same location on another Windows client and it worked.
I had also added a word that I shouldn't have added. There currently does not appear to be a way to edit the user dictionary through Joplin. When opening Custom Dictionary.txt it was apparent that the file contents have been "checksummed". I deleted the word and found that the file was replaced by a backup copy of the dictionary (current up to the last addition) found in the same folder, effectively putting the word back. I assume that this was triggered by the checksum failure. The checksum appears to be MD5 (16 bytes) but I have not yet had any luck in manually calculating one that the spellchecker will accept.
I can imagine that over time this file could become very important to users as they personalise their dictionaries. It is not something that I would like to undertake again from the beginning...
Suggestions for consideration / future development:
Adding the ability to edit the user dictionary.
Any plans to develop a Joplin backup package should include this file.
It would be useful if it was possible to sync this data between clients automatically so that adding a word in any client would propogate to all the user's clients. I am guessing that this one would not be an easy task but I just thought I would mention it as I am sure others will!!
Although this is 8 months old, I've just started using Spell Check and include the Linux path for others who may want to backup their custom dictionary:
I have come across the same problem except I cannot find the "Custom Dictionary.txt" file, so apparently things have changed. This file exists but has not been updated recently:
This calculates the checksum and appends it and the checksum_v1 = text to the end of the file.
Like this:
Quit Joplin, backup the existing ~/.config/Joplin/Custom Dictionary.txt, replace it with the Custom Dictionary.txt file you just made, start Joplin.
It has worked for me so far, but no promises (hence the need to backup the original file)
If for some reason you want to add words as well I believe that you will need to sort the file before adding the checksum. I've not tested this very much and not at all for any language other than english. Also I do not know if adding a word which is already in the main dictionary will cause problems.
This sorts your file contents in a manner which is case-sensitive (like the original), removes any duplicate entries (just in case it causes problems) and saves the modified file using the same filename.
btw, Don’t you just hate file and directory names with spaces in them? They always break shell scripts that rely on the unix default of splitting on white space. Ugh…
Today, I need to update the custom dictionary because I accidentally added an incorrect word. Following your guidelines didn't completely work for me, so after some analysis and understanding that this was performing under Windows, I'm sharing the difference process that worked on my PC, which is running Ubuntu 24.04 instead. Differences:
Instead of keeping a single empty line at the end of the file, I saved it without any line after the last word.
I ran this slightly different command in Linux: echo -n "checksum_v1 = $(md5sum "Custom Dictionary (Copy).txt" | cut -d ' ' -f 1)" >> "Custom Dictionary (Copy).txt"
Please check and confirm as I did these changes working before updating the Custom Dictionary.txt
After adding a word that was badly spelled in the dictionary, I followed your method to try to delete it. I had two issues:
I am on Windows, so I edited my file C:\USERS\Me\Appdata\Roaming\joplin\Custom dictionnary.txt
I deleted the bad word
I calculated the checksum with MD5 - Cyberchef by selecting all the text and the very beginning of the line under the last word
I replaced the checksum with the one found
Closed and restarted Joplin
First issue:
The Custom Dictionnary.txt file was emptied each time, with only: checksum_v1 = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Second issue:
My deleted word os always here!
It is the word Syncthing (already added to the dictionary) that I added with this bad spelling by mistake: SYncthing.
After deleting it from the Custom Dictionnary.txt file, it is still present.
I tried to also delete the word that is well spelled, but the two are still present:
Hi all! ~joplin-noob here, hope I'm posting in the correct manner...
My problem is quite similar, but what I want to do is take my list of custom words+abbreviations I already have for other apps and bulk-add it into the Joplin dictionary.
I've gathered from multiple posts how to edit joplin's dictionary.txt -- but can someone pls help me out with the command syntax on Win11 to add the checksum on the final(empty) line of the file?
I have no idea how to do this using the Windows terminal but you could use a tool like Cyberchef to calculate the hash.
Select the MD5 "recipe" and paste your dictionary into the input pane** without the checksum line. Then ensuring that you have the cursor on a new line after the last entry (red square in the screenshot), read the MD5 value from the output pane (blue square in the screenshot).
**= Before you paste the dictionary into Cyberchef make sure that the text is sorted alphabetically and is case-sensitive. Otherwise Joplin will sort your text and the checksum you calculated on the unsorted text will fail.
